Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 85: Avery Fisher Hall

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

this is the one where kate knows more than us yes we know it's named something else now McMansion Hell: https://mcmansionhell.com/ Derailleur: https://derailleur.substack.com/ Guest Crit (with Roz on 10/26!): https://www.twitch.tv/failedarchitecture TEXAS ABORTION FUNDS: here are two, there are more and we will accept receipts from any of them and we'll send you the bonus episodes (by e-mail or twitter DM) https://abortionfunds.org/fund/lilith-fund/ https://abortionfunds.org/fund/texas-equal-access-fund/ HOW TO GIVE YOURSELF AN ABORTION https://jewishcurrents.org/how-to-give-yourself-an-abortion/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

ZenCaster is going. We're good. Pre-flight check has ended. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. This is your fucking podcast about a concert hall. Yes. Hello and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Gordwell Kelly. I'm the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Liam.

Hey, Liam. Hi. I'm Liam Anderson. I'm the colony of bacteria piloting Liam Anderson. The corpse of Liam Anderson. Yes, I am sick. My pronouns are he, him. I'm going to spend most of this episode on mute simply so you don't hear me sniffle every 30 seconds. Nice. I know the people love their sniffles, but yeah, I'm not going to do that to you. I'm not going to Alice Gordwell Kelly your asses. We have a guest. Hello, guest. We have a guest.

Hello. I'm Kate Wagner. I'm an architecture critic. My pronouns are she, her. You know a lot about architectural acoustics. Why is that, Kate? Tell us. Yeah, I went to grad school. Oh, rookie mistake. I dropped out of grad. I know. So true about grad school. I was very close to doing that, but I finished and I wrote my thesis on concert halls from mid-century. So yeah, I know a lot about this subject. This is, this, this concert hall changed everything in architectural acoustics.

I assume for the better, right? I mean, that's like kind of an understatement. It was, yes, for the better, I would say like this was kind of like the prude I go, or I guess not even really like the, but like, you know what I mean? Like this was like the thing that like initiated an entire discourse that changed a field that happened around the same time and modernism was like a subject in that field. Even though like with prude I go, for example, like there were other factors involved that for the failure that almost none of them were architectural actually involved like public funding and racism and all kinds of things.

But Avery Fisher Hall, Philharmonic Hall, David Geffen Hall, you know, whatever it's called now. The Hall when you're looking at have fewer names, just pick one, you shouldn't be allowed to like bribe and philharmonic by being like, here is $50 million, put my name on the fucking thing. Yeah, the thing is, is that like what we're talking about now is Philharmonic Hall, the first iteration of Avery Fisher Hall, which, which I know it is Avery Fisher Hall because that's its name. They changed the name right when I was in the middle of grad school.

So very annoying because I was writing a thesis, but like, this is kind of like a thesis ship situation now at this point, because this hall has just been completely gutted and now it's being gutted for a third time. This is like a cursed, truly a cursed project that hopefully the actual, actually the signs now point to it's going to be good again, which were good for the first time because the acoustic stuff that they're doing is like what they should do because we have the science and stuff now. But anyway, I guess we should start from the beginning.

Well, first, truly a nightmare. Yeah. So yes, go ahead. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. OK, it's the goddamn news. It's the goddamn news. Washington Metro fucked up again. Oh, no. It derailed three times, apparently.

It. Yes. Last week, the blue line, there was a train between, I think, Roslyn and Arlington Cemetery derailed three times. The third time it didn't manage to re-rail itself, you know, which is a train that could and then could and then couldn't and then couldn't and then really couldn't. So right now, Metro has every single 7000 series train out of service because of axle defects that led to this derailment,

as I understood it this morning, although I think there was just a press release saying it might have been something else. And that means today, Monday, October 18th, the Metro has the capability to run exactly 40 trains all day. Is that a lot? Is that a lot? That sounds like a lot. You know, I see how you would think that. But no, never mind.

The Glasgow subway is the smallest, tiny little model train thing in the world. So they're running like 30 minute headways today. Aren't the fuck that sucks? Is this the red line? Is this the red line? The blue line, the blue line. Well, I think it's every line. Oh, well, for once, it is not the red line. Yes. Red line just so hot right now.

Yes, because it catches on fire all the time. That's why it's the red line. The red is for flames. I am constantly impressed by how badly Metro can fuck something up. Dude, every day it feels like. I used to like wish we had like a big metro like system here in Philly, you know, because it goes more places and you don't wish that anymore. I don't wish that anymore.

I wish I'm glad we have a subway that works. I just saw a New York Times article that a woman was sexually assaulted on an L train and there are at least eight passengers in the car. None of them did anything. So you're friendly reminder to intervene in that shit. It's going to be fine. Worst case scenario, you get a stab wound. Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, I'm not sure that's the approach I would take for trying to like exhort people to intervene and stuff. But yes, yes, don't don't don't. Worst case scenario, you die, but still. Yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it to die being an adult. Yeah, die with honor. Yeah, exactly.

This is this has been the die with honor podcast. Yeah, and now we will all commit suffocates. That's right. Speaking of dying with honor. Oh, that's so loud. Yeah, I know. Colin Powell died of covid. Sort of with covid.

Yeah, he had to answer. We should point out. Eighty seven years old. Yeah, he was fully vaccinated, but there's been a lot of like, oh, he was slowly vaccinated takes. It's like, yes, but he also had cancer. Yeah, he was a war criminal who many times, many times from from Vietnam to Iraq, all the way through to Iraq again.

Yeah, we could only hope to have a record as horrific and bloody as Colin Powell. Guy who did the cover up of the Me Lai massacre. Did he actually know that? Yeah, yeah, that's why he like made his bones. That was like his big deal in Vietnam. Was he he helped cover that shit up? What's what's the equivalent of like throwing a coin into the into the fountain in Rome for like doing war crimes in Iraq?

Doing sure you'll return to do more war crimes. Yeah, I mean, like again, the the sanest person and in the Bush administration during the lead up to the war in Iraq to which, of course, did not stop him from going to the UN with a little fake vile of anthrax to lie about it. So clearly his conscience didn't trouble him that much. And it killed a bank of what, like two million people. And, you know, what's two million people between France?

Yeah, that's right. Or it's all human life. Anyway, rest in peace, bitch. Yeah, I like rest in peace, bitch. That I was going to say rest in peace. But then I like stumbled and I said the nice thing instead. Oh, look at you. I know, I know.

I'm really disappointed myself. A good hearted part kept podcast. That's right. That's right. I'm sick. It's going to go out sort of a story legacy of public service. You know, which also included things like inviting Panama. Winston. Oh, Winston. Hello, Winston.

Winston doesn't like the idea of invading Panama. No, Winston should he? Yeah, he doesn't. Winston, that's all. Otherwise you're going to grab me out of the room. I hate to see it. I hate to see. I hate to see Colin Powell die. But you know, no, no, not really.

The thing is that I thought I thought I thought that, like, Kissinger would go first. But then I also. Kissinger never goes first. That was the first thing. Yeah, that's the that's the other thing, right? Because Kissinger is never going to die, I figured if you just do enough evil shit in the service of the State Department, you it's like insulates all of your vital organs from your many diseases and you just don't die.

So clearly Colin Powell should have started like a third or fourth war. I mean, you're already you're already playing with house money, right? Kissinger is just he did enough war crimes that he's going to sort of evolve into a war crimes mentat from Dune. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Colin Powell is never going to become the front of the sand one now. And that's that's that's a shame. That's that, you know, it's a smirch on his legacy,

which, as we know, was previously untainted and good. That's right. That's right. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. OK. Well, we're going to start with a question as usual. Well, not what is acoustics? It's a thing that you use in Winamp, which incidentally, thank you for the huge hit of nostalgia there.

Really whips the llama's ass. Downloading Winamp skins at 3am. Oh, yeah. No, I'm not doing Socratic method today. I'm actually throwing this to Kate. Kate, our fearless leader. What is acoustics? It's when the waves, the sound waves. Yes. Acoustics is the science of sound.

It's the includes a number of fields, including physics, like physical acoustics, which is, you know, sound waves, that kind of thing, how sound works, like in the abstract, like mathematically, that kind of thing includes like all kinds of fields, like geocoustics, which is basically mostly used for drilling for oil. Bio acoustics, which is used for like hearing bats, talking stuff, which is very cool.

One of the cooler fields in acoustics. See, these are all very hard sciences, right? And then we've got architectural acoustics, which is a science in the same way that architecture is a science, which is to say it's not. There is science behind architectural acoustics. And there is engineering. You can be an acoustical engineer.

And that means also doing things like making speakers, which I used to do at a company when I was an intern back in the day. And like making recordings, like all kinds of applied acoustics is what we would say. But like architectural acoustics is funny because to give you an example of where the science is, we still need a supercomputer at Rensler to model how sound, to model visually sound as a wave in a room,

in a simple cube, actually, to do that, that visual modeling. So if anyone tells you that like we can model and we will know what a room will sound like before it's built, they're lying. The truth of the matter is, is that we can make very educated guesses about how sound a room will sound. And like the more complex the room, the less predictable it is. This is the case with like the Elbpharhomony, for example, which is very famous, very expensive and is a really, really weird room

because they put so much diffusion in there to break up sound that like certain things just sound weird in there. Whether or not people will like it, you know, to 50 years from now, we'll have to see. Sometimes people like a hall when it opens and thinks it's crap 50 years from now. It takes about 50 years for Hall's reputation to really be solidified. But sometimes there's always been these stories of people trusting

the science too much and to the point where bad things happen. And to be fair, like the science has come a long way, but most of that science isn't modeling so much as it is measurement. We've become really good at taking microphones and speakers into concert halls and being able to measure and like to some extent model how sound works in a space. However, and so some first of this reason, when we're when acquisitions do a really big concert hall project, for example, they'll do things like build like a scale, a one to four scale model or something

like a scale model that is like the size of a small room with like and then they'll run measurements in that model. That's like one of the safest ways to model how a room will sound, because the truth of the matter is that the computer modeling and things like that, it just isn't there and it won't be there probably for several years. So we can visually model existing rooms and we're really good at measuring them. And we've really come a long way in understanding how sound works in rooms, not only like architecturally, but like, you know, things like like psychocoustically

like how things like acoustically is when you play the scary like knife noises from the movie. You just play the cell track a full blast. But like the role that like the ear, the human ear plays in acoustics and that they're by and also the auditory nerve. So it's a really interesting it's a really interesting field, but like a lot of a lot of science, a lot of or like a lot of applied science, like, you know, architectural acoustics is kind of mostly design. And the science bit of it is there's engineering and it's like very serious engineering.

Like I don't want to like get the impression that it's not, but the but it's not engineering in the way that like people like engineer like jet engines or something. Like there's a lot of there's a lot of things that are difficult to predict and model and measure. And so the truth of the matter is that we still won't know what a room will sound like until that room is built. And there's still which is why the field relies so heavily on precedent. Things that have worked like will continue to work, which is why for the last like 10 years, like every concert hall,

major concert hall that's been built has been built sort of in the style of like Walt Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry in 2003. That was finished in 2003 is really in 90s Concert Hall. But it's really that that vineyard style, because we know that works. It produces like really nice architecture. It's like a satisfying like acoustic environment. People feel like enveloped by the sound like this. We've been studying how vineyard hall works vineyard style halls or semi vineyard style halls work since the 60s.

And so we can produce relatively accurately like a hall that will sound good. But when you start to experience, see, this is like this is a catch 22, right? Like when you want to experiment and you want to do something different, it comes with the risk of things going wrong. And so but but like this brings us to Philharmonic Hall. Like Philharmonic Hall was like a massive embarrassing failure for the for the science of acoustics. Like it's probably its biggest failure in the history of its of its time since it's not an it's not an old field. Acoustics like there have been like things like, you know, like organ organ builders and stuff in like medieval ages or whatever.

But like the actual science of architectural acoustics didn't exist until the beginning of the 20th century. With the with the work of Harvard physicist Wallace Saban. And Wallace Saban is a really interesting guy because he basically was like a like an adjunct professor who like got assigned like the shittiest room imaginable to like do a lecture in. And he was like so he was so pissed at this room, which was like an art gallery at Harvard, was so shitty that like he decided to invent an entirely new field of science to fix it. I mean, that's the best possible reason to do that. Yeah, his working conditions were bad.

And so he was like, you know what, we got to figure this out. So he went across the street to like the church, some church and brought back a bunch of cushions from the pews. And he would like basically take like these crude measurements of like what would happen like whenever he added a new cushion to this to like the delay or the reverberation of the sound of an impulse, which in this case was him blowing through a tube or him blowing through an organ pipe. And so it's so funny because like he just like created the math behind what's known as like the reverberation equation or the Saban equation for reverberation time. And by doing that, by quantifying that he was able to he basically found it the beginning of

architectural acoustics, but it's because his room sucked, like he was really just like if his labor conditions were better, this would have someone else would have done it. And it wouldn't have been as good of a story. But anyways, Philharmonic Hall really fascinating. Let's get to it. So this is a great story because it has it also touches on like all the other bad things that were happening with modernism and like urban renewal and all that. Well, I thought I thought a fun place to start would be sort of some of the some of the history

of architectural acoustics before before there was any science behind it. You know, just this this famous or this quote here from Charles Garnier, who did, you know, the Paris Opera, he said, I gave myself pains to master this bizarre science of acoustics, but nowhere did I find a positive rule to guide me. On the contrary, nothing but contradictory statements. I must explain that I adopted no principle that my plan has been based on no theory, and I leave successor failure to chance alone. Oh, yeah.

Like an acrobat who closes his eyes and clings to the ropes of an ascending balloon. Fuck around and apparently find out. Yeah. Fuck. And and that's that's that's the theory behind the main auditorium at the Paris Opera. Is there is no theory to like it? I guess. Fuck it. We'll do it live. I like that. I appreciate that.

Yeah, truly. It's funny because opera is interesting because opera houses were shaped architecturally more by like social strata than they were acoustics. Like it was all about like the rich people being seen and like the poor is not being seen. So that had like architectural consequences. And that's always been the case throughout the history of performing art spaces. Like, for example, like before before when when like, for example, when classical music and was only a figment of the aristocracy and you had like court composers and all this, like music rooms were designed for like small small numbers of people and like

were really like social institutions more than they were places for like this. They had to sound good. And up until like the 19th century, when people listened to classical music, they were also just like walking around, like talking, fucking off, basically, faffing about. And like the idea of like the silent reverent concert hall is like actually a really bourgeois idea that came from listening practices in the 19th century when the public concert became a thing. And like you had the emerge like the emergence of like the bourgeoisie and bourgeois culture.

And so like the bourgeoisie had to do what we're often finding things that made them look like they were like like aristocratic. And so things like stratified seating in public concert halls based on concert ticket prices. Things like the the obsession with silence and like with like this kind of like etiquette of the concert hall, which like actual aristocrats like never really cared about. It's actually just like bourgeois people and their obsession with quiet. And yeah, it's a really all of like what we know about like classical music, concert building culture was basically invented by like upper middle class people in the 19th

century. And so because of this, like because of all of these different social factors, concert hall design was really kind of based on the current architectural practices at the time, which were neoclassical in style. So like temple like buildings. Like for example, the music Brian and Vienna or any kind of 19th century concert hall the concert about in Amsterdam. These are all very neoclassical high romantic era neoclassical buildings.

And they just so happened actually that the combined taste for things that looked like temples and the current taste for like a bunch of like overdone weepy architectural ornament from like all different periods of like the neo of like the classical era, mostly grief but some Roman and also like the pre-election for stratified seating so that rich people could show off. And also the current practices of building ventilation, which required Claire story windows at the highest level of the concert also they can like let out all like the farts and smoke and stuff.

All of these things combined accidentally made a really fucking good concert hall actually. The 19th century shoebox style concert halls are some of the best in the world and they basically did it not because of like the science of architectural acoustics, which didn't exist yet, but because of this combination of like social factors, architectural factors, like an engineering factors. So what you're saying is that like sort of 19th century class system is scientifically the best way to organize a concert hall by accident. Yeah.

Exactly. That was exactly kind of how it happened, but it's funny because like the actual the ventilation stuff because they didn't yet they had gas lamps at the time. That was actually very important too and why concert halls sound so well. It's really fascinating to me because like if they didn't have those that that ventilation at the top that like they have a bunch of basically empty space above the highest seated listener that like that allowed like because the heat from the chandeliers was really hot and so no one would want to sit up there.

Like you had to like have these windows that you could open to ventilate the space and they had to be suitably suitably certifiably big enough to do that. What it ended up doing was creating like this like what we call warmth in a concert hall because you have space above the highest seated listener it creates spaciousness this the sensation of being enveloped in sound. Like which we usually like in play like warmth is actually has more to do with like bass response but like it is it as like a vibe I guess less than like a technical term. That spaciousness is what makes those concert halls so great because it's just actually the

right amount of people in the hall the right amount of spaciousness the right use of materials in a way that makes it like reverberant and like really like lovely but not like too wet not too echoey. So it's actually really fascinating to me personally how like a bunch of shit just came together in a way that really worked I think it's a really great metaphor for the field as a whole. Asking asking if my concert hall is creepy or wet. Yeah so true. So true about what not a great word but like it is like as opposed to dry which is like not

reverberant at all wet. Our concert halls were too wet. Yes it's very moist. Ventipurals wife. No. Yeah this concert hall is just dripping. Oh I'm pointy as hell. It is dripping.

Hey Justin how do you how do you get to Carnegie Hall? How do you get to practice? One day we'll play Carnegie Hall and they'll blew us off stage. Yeah we'll do the Boston Molasses Flood at Carnegie Hall. So yank you suck right as I'm being pelted with cans. Yeah probably more into like some kind of other you what you go up there and do is shit talk squash or something. Yeah you have a racket bowl.

I say Columbia is the seventh best school in the Ivy League 10,000 times until I'm scoring at our stage with one of those giant hooks. That's funny. Thank you. I'm dying. Yeah try not to try not to go out like Colin Powell. Yeah well this is sort of this is sort of where our story starts right. You know it's an old-fashioned big auditorium good acoustics.

There's the home in the New York City Philharmonic orchestra and the 50s everyone's like this is an old-fashioned thing. And its owner wanted to redevelop it so they didn't renew the lease of the Philharmonic right. What is a Philharmonic anyway? It's just a symphony orchestra. It's an orchestra that loves harmony. Yeah so at Carnegie Hall actually like acoustically speaking is not that great. Basically like if it's like David actually was a really great acoustician

even though he was the first acoustician and he knew for he worked for example on Boston Symphony Hall which is one of the greatest symphony halls ever. And he because he understood like not completely but like to some extent like the role he that like designing it like a shoebox style hall was really like a good idea. And like he was like very intent on trying to figure out like why but he knew based on precedent that that style of hall work. But at the same time like David went off got drafted into World War I and got shot and died in like at like the age of 30.

So like the world of acoustics changed like quite a bit after that yeah. So he was like kind of like a bit of a hero in acoustics because he was actually just right about acoustics before but anyways like so people took his science and decided to like apply it and kind of like the like the first early crude ways. And so like again like you have a modern this is again a social change you have differences in like the concert going public more and more people not just bourgeois people could were going to concerts at the beginning of the 20th century and so you had to just the things like sight lines become way more important than for and selling tickets

then like acoustics or whatever and then also like changes in architecture. The Beaux Arts style was more conducive to like an auditorium of the size. Anyways it's the same pattern that happens over and over again but the truth is that the New York Philharmonic had like kind of outgrown Carnegie Hall. And they wanted something new and just so happens that like urban renewal was happening. Oh yeah. And they could just yeah let's let's go into that. Yeah so this is this is a fun one because we're looking at what are they bulldoze.

The failure you know the best laid plans of federal housing legislation happened here you know in 1937 there was the Wagner Stiegel Act right and provides federal subsidies to housing authorities to replace substandard housing with new public housing you know there's a specific stipulation in there that you replace it one for one you can't actually build more housing than existed there before you got to demolish to build because they thought it would adversely affect the housing market if you built lots of new public housing right you know. Yeah for the better. Yeah exactly for the better obviously but you know that we're you know this is built with the

this legislation has lots of sympathies for landlords you know. And then what exactly is substandard housing now that's left as an exercise to the housing authority. Now this is this power is expanded in 1949 with Taft-Ellander Wagner right this provides cities with a whole big pot of cash for something called slum clearance under title one right which basically to fund any project that replaces substandard housing with anything right. Like a concert hall. Like a concert hall could be a park could even be middle income or even luxury housing there's another there's title three of that same act authorized a bunch of funding for public

housing but a lot of planners and politicians had you know other ideas right. And one of those guys was of course Robert Moses friend of the show friend of the show Robert Moses still won't come on for some reason I don't know. Just assume his course really Robert tell me about the bridges. We're doing a cadaver synod but with on a podcast form. It's about time and it coming. Yeah so he's famous for you know the roads and the highways and the bridges you also chairman of the mayor's committee on slum clearance and he used his title one funds

extensively for all kinds of things which were not low income housing right. You know a lot of times they would just go in you'd condemn houses and tenements you'd demolish them then you'd hand off the land the private developers to build modern you know apartment towers right. And determining what was a slum was highly racialized and the program was just an engine of mass displacement and inflection of misery right. And in the early 50s when this program was really in full swing Moses was struck by a series of coincidences right. Fordham University wanted a new campus metropolitan opera thought it had an adequate facilities.

An ice cream truck driving down outside my window I don't know if my microphone's going to pick that up but if so please enjoy. I'm getting a little bit of ice cream truck yeah. Oh I would go over to the ice cream right now it wouldn't help me but yeah. So yeah the the metropolitan opera had inadequate facilities the Philharmonic was being kicked out of Carnegie Hall which they kind of wanted to leave anyway. And the cog started turning in Moses's head and he realized the solution here was to build an incredible new cultural center with facilities for the opera the Philharmonic

a new Fordham campus and other cultural facilities right including the LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts relocated Juilliard School a new home for the New York Ballet and a whole bunch of other cultural accoutrements right. And also 4400 apartments and 400 of those apartments would actually be low income incredible right. I mean god it's fucking it's so grim that it's like better than today's. Yeah well well well well hold on a second. Now this plan was set in motion in 1957 it was going to be located in a neighborhood called San Juan Hill right. John D. Rockefeller the third started fundraising for the whole shebang and soon it was clear the Lincoln Center was happening.

Here it is in 1924 ish San Juan Hill which also was was also known as Lincoln Square at the time the people who live there call it San Juan Hill but Lincoln Square was the official name of the neighborhood out of curiosity. What was the sort of like a demographic of San Juan Hill. I'm glad you asked. It was New York City's most heavily populated African American community. Also a lot of Caribbean Americans there right. It's crazy how this always seems to happen along racial lines. Surely just a bunch of weird coincidences. You can see you got Columbus circled down here here's Central Park you get the New York Central West Side Yards over here this is now a bunch of Trump powers. Right. Well I think they take that they took

the Trump name off most of them. Right here this area that's been pre-highlighted in red this is where the Lincoln Center was going to go but in addition to that they demolished several blocks down here for Fordham they demolished some stuff over here for housing. I think all the way up to here was various other crap right. So they took out a lot and so the city just condemns this whole neighborhood with the exception of one building which they decided to purchase for well above market price. That's probably how that works still because it was owned by Robert F. Kennedy. Oh okay. I didn't actually know about that part. So now for the cultural center and the 4400 apartments 7700 people and 800 businesses

were displaced. Most of them wound up moving to Harlem but they did have the right to compete over the 400 low income apartments. Oh I'm sure that was conducted in a perfectly like sort of orderly way. Oh yeah I don't think I don't think anyone really moved back into the project area there's no point you know especially since not only were you displaced but the place you worked was displaced. So yeah this is your standard urban renewal here. Well it's renewed. Yes it's renewed. Okay can I also add like one little thing which is that there's also like a cold war element to this where there's like lots of internal talks amongst like Rockefeller and donors about like creating like a palace for music to show like the Soviet Union that America was

really good and cared about the arts and it's very funny to me that like they did this by like displacing like the working class which like I'm sure the Soviet Union would have taken notice of. Well it was interesting because it's an L all the way around. It's big L. The L stands for Lincoln. Yes. So they were big you know they demolished all these tenements right there's big big protests about this actually you can see folks protesting here holding signs like shelter before culture you know humane progress means decent relocation you know $47.50 a room progress for whom that's an interesting one. And grammatical too. Yes you know and they a bunch of groups file lawsuits to get the

project stopped you know and these are treated with contempt and you know thrown out title one slump clearance means you can do anything right and they start construction on what was to be called Philharmonic Hall right and being an auditorium it required some special considerations during construction. They had a special architect Max Ambramovitz right and a special consulting firm that did acoustics Bolt Berenek and Newman which apparently is now part of Raytheon. Everything eventually is just part of Raytheon. They have the second oldest extant domain name bbn.com registered April 24th 1985.

Oh thank you thank you Ross. Yes it's a fun fact. Yes that actually is a fun fact. There's a lot of fun facts about Bolt Berenek. Yeah it's a fun fact when it comes back to Raytheon. What I said that there's so Bolt Berenek or Newman was one of the first modern acoustics firms and they so it's funny the reason what they got it first of all they got into the internet really early and second of all like they also the reason why they became Raytheon is because basically Bolt Berenek and Newman financed their like high culture stuff for acoustics by also doing acoustical work such as like you know measurements for developing measurement centers for noise like working with aircraft all kinds of other things that was that helped fund the war machine.

Lots of jet-side stuff. Make it more efficient. This was very much like general dynamics vibes you know what I mean but like the cultural stuff they did was almost like kind of on the side but it was like the it was the big project of Leo Berenek who was the second b in bbn. Bolt and Newman were more into the other stuff anyways but before like all of the Cold War like I said there's always a Cold War angle but Leo Berenek is kind of is a fascinating guy. He died like my second year at grad school so I never got to talk to him which truly devastating but he is basically considered the father of like modernist acoustics one would say but he was also a great historian of concert halls and his he was very intent on in my own work in

in acoustics as an academic follows in this tradition pretty much almost exactly. He's very big on going around the world and cataloging and measuring and understanding different concert halls. His first book Music Acoustics and Architecture was published in 1962 and it basically features like about like a hundred concert halls that like he went around and did like acoustic measurements in and studied and like provides like the plants and sections and like the history it's actually all of his books are really lovely. He did there's three there's three editions of this book and the last one I think was published in like 2004 but like don't quote me on that but they're all really good very important

in my own research very important in the history of architectural acoustics because kind of what out Leobranic like we wouldn't have nearly as much of the history of the field and he but because he went around and studied why concert halls work or why he thought they worked like I remind you again that like the science of acoustics like this is before the age of the computer this is like when we were basically using like field recording equipment to do two measurements where you would fire off a shotgun in a hall and like pop the balloon and like have us yeah you would fire a shotgun off in a hall and like and like measure the like record it or measure the amount of time it took to for the sound to dissipate this is how it did why don't

you still do that I did not know that Frank Furnace was the first acoustician in his office. The reason is the reason is because we're not allowed to travel with pistols anymore mm-hmm also we develop more complex like standard tests for measuring reverberation time more accurately but this was kind of like a crude operation and yet because of like what what was considered at the time to be like modern modern science like Baranik really thought he knew everything about concert halls and he thought he knew what makes a really good concert hall some of his but the thing is it's like he didn't know everything not even nearly so it's really it's really he totally I mean he devised basically this

comprehensive plan believing that like his careful scientific calibrations and whatnot would produce a great concert hall worthy of like Lincoln Center's ambitious project it was really kind of a surgical top-down approach that's really no different from like technocratic planning uh Moses employed with with some clearance um but it was yeah it's very interesting that like basically Baranik and his colleagues who at the time were Russell Johnson and Theodore Shorts and V. G. Waters all of whom became successful independent acquisitions of the in their own right um they believe that careful placement of certain architectural and tactical elements based on like the latest concepts and acoustics could help mitigate

the acoustical problems in the modern concert hall um the thing is is the Philharmonic Society really wanted to have a concert hall that sounded like a 19th century shoebox but they wanted it within the modernist architectural sensibility of uh like the architecture of Max Abramovitz uh and of course like again more integration stuff with like modern urban planning so Baranik originally conceived Philharmonic Hall to take on the shoebox shape of its inspiration which was Boston Symphony Hall but he had to fit this shape into like a modernist building and this ended up contributing to its downfall first of all like it was known at the time thanks to the work of Baranik himself that the success of the 19th century shoebox hall

was partially attributable to the varying decorative architectural embellishments which acted like to diffuse sound and break it up in a way that was like satisfying and created ambience and warmth and whatever however like Baranik himself laments in his reflection on Philharmonic Hall after one year of its use quote contemporary architectural taste tends towards simplicity and deliberately avoids the elaborative decorative elements that provide multiple diffusing surfaces in the older halls the extensive quote contouring of the older halls also acted to break up any large flat surfaces that might create echoes in addition the 19th century shoebox halls had like high ceilings to provide a suitably long reverberation time

meaning it sounds spacious and nice however Philharmonic Hall which was you know Max Abramovitz being a modernist building kept a really low stratified profile that was not tall enough to provide this necessary ceiling height like I talked about before this is like the biggest problem more bougie but no they should have used gas lamps and then they would have had to ventilate the space and then they would have had the necessary ceiling yeah yes eep girl boss exactly so Baranik had to basically mitigate these problems with a variety of solutions some of which were like increasingly crackpot including so they tried first of all to do like a reflecting array of overhead ceiling panels which you I think you can see in the pictures oh I got that later on

in the slides what they call early oh what they call like early reflections to the center of the main floor but unfortunately the gaps between these panels because they had to be pretty and modernist would be too were too wide and therefore their ability to actually reflect sound was greatly diminished and there's also like they had this weird stage wall that featured quote an acoustically transparent slatted structure and quote that aimed to hide unsightly ventilation outlets again modernism it's air-conditioned behind which was a reflective wall all of these were solutions to the problems with the architectural concept rather than like Baranik and his colleagues original intent for a good concert hall and these corrections were not enough for the hall was like a massive

failure despite and despite attempts at improvement it was ultimately gutted and replaced with Avery Fisher Hall in 1976 uh see okay but the thing is is that like the greed of developers and elites who wanted to gain like monetary cultural capital at the expense of you know 14 blocks where people lived and worked combined with like an absolutely dogmatic architectural and urbanist programming that allowed for no flexibility for even like the actual program of what it was supposed to be doing um that's really what kind of seal and fill our monocles fate uh oh yeah this is like really funny okay we get to the funniest part actually which like is called the seat dip effect incident oh no oh boy uh so yeah yeah so did someone say

sponsors yeah that's right we're getting dipped the elite sponsors of Philharmonic Hall wanted to maximize seat count in order to maximize the amount of profit for concert because again this is like capitalist bullshit hold on okay this being a luxury hall because I got a whole slide on this too okay okay okay okay I'll stop yeah I'll stop yeah so I mean you know uh uh Baranek you know I'd done a number of auditorium projects right I looked over some of the just some of the Philharmonic archives I saw like the uh the what's it like he came up with 18 properties of an auditorium after the big survey you mentioned some of them seem to be quantitative some of them are qualitative I had some difficulty figuring them out I I don't know what I'm talking

about you know but they were okay you're stuck with Charles Garnier uh just being like yeah you know whatever feels right um stay loose you know but there were yeah there were some issues with uh with the um with the with the actual putting together of the building right which is why we need to return to the slide I had the last time Kate was on way back in episode four been a while it's been a minute how the building is designed and built a guy takes a poop in a field things go downhill from there so you know we got the client in this case it's a committee of people right who want the building and they tell the architect in this case uh Max and Bramovitz like okay here's here's the building this is what we want this is this is our idea and then

the architect says what the hell are these guys thinking has to go about turning their vague idea into a workable building there's some back and forth here the architect sends their drawing to the engineers in this case including an acoustics guy you know once again these engineers go through the architect's drawing said and says what the hell what the hell are these people doing they start fighting with each other and the architect about what goes where what's practical there's more back and forth here the HVAC guy roots a duct straight through an eye beam there's conflicts with the plumbing right so on and so forth right but eventually eventually they finish fighting with each other and you know someone puts a PE stamp on there right which

means someone is criminally liable if something goes wrong you know there's different stamps you know in jersey it's a crimper um and these are set out for permitting the drawings are set on for permitting and the inspectors are not engineers in a lot of places the stamp is there nothing goes wrong we get to the next step quickly the contractors take the drawing and say fucking hell these chuckle fucks and and they they send the drawings out to some contract contract or subcontractors who look at those drawings and say what the fuck and jesus age christ right they make modifications the drawings send back shop drawings showing what they can build and what they intend to build architects and engineers sign off or say no you dumb idiot you

have to do it this way there's more back and forth here and then you know i have the labor who's actually building the damn building they're constantly complaining about all the boneheaded decisions made above them and of course they know the most about building but they're least able to make design changes since you got to go way up the chain of command right the architect comes back and does the as built drawings which i've complained about previously and the client's been meddling the whole time in this the architects have been trying to hurt all these cats the whole time right um and uh you know so in some in summary it's a goddamn miracle anything gets built and government contracting is even worse now in this case we're doing quasi government

contracting right so for the lincoln center rather than being one guy who wanted the building there's a building committee right which was composed of all kinds of stakeholders in the projects he had a real estate guy had a guy from the philharmonic orchestra he had an opera guy he had politicians and they may or may not know anything about buildings or auditoriums and the building committee was subject to its own whims and desires and so at brahmavitz tried to coordinate everything through his office um did this work no um i think one thing which was a big mistake is they published the design in the new york times before they built the building yeah yeah and they get all the people who read the new york times gets to have an opinion

and it it was published as a 2400 seat auditorium which was shockingly less than the 2760 seat carnagy hall right hmm so a bunch of newspapers especially the new york herald tribune right which is um the newspaper marx wrote for um decided also appears in uh breathless yes they decided to take on the cause of making the auditorium bigger um and the building committee listened and told the brahmavitz to cram some more seats in and it got bigger just put them in there it got to 2738 seats and it got fatter and wider and it got longer yeah i'm a i'm a rower not a shower but yeah and uh baranik said listen this is gonna fuck up the acoustics and that got as far as brahmavitz's office and didn't get it get to the building committee

he wasn't able to raise his objections to the people who made the decisions yeah yeah yeah yeah it was truly this is like see like acoustics is like one of those things that's like always valued and engineered even like concert except for in concert halls but even in concert halls it happens it's like so funny to me but anyway it's great here music good well i did they did a couple other changes without really consulting uh baranik here right which is um the uh acoustic clouds were made narrower you can see in this chart down here yep which um resulted in uh according to modeling um the original proposed ones would uh you know you'd have a better we'd have a better base in the auditorium with the original ones versus the new ones you can sort of see in this

chart i'm i'm again i'm a dumb idiot here i don't know why yeah yeah go ahead they really mess with these um they wound up doing a safety alteration to them because they were supposed to be individually adjustable right um but someone said that's unsafe what if there's an earthquake they'll they'll whack into each other so they were all welded together make it more rigid yes so you couldn't really adjust them individually anymore now we're talking i don't i don't know if i don't know congratulations else this must be i'm having a great time yeah yeah it's a red lester day the there we go that's the phrase i wanted again i am i am on the cusp of death so there was there is a picture of uh the acoustic clouds in the next slide so everyone could see what we're talking about

take me now lord yeah um then the contractor who did the welding misread the shop drawings and yeah and and welded them together uh six feet too low or just a front row oh you you wanted a concert hall what i've delivered you is like perfectly welded solid cube it's like a it's like a cavity magnetron you have to fit a philharmonic into i think some acoustic surfaces in the building were value engineered out like panels on the walls and these are replaced by painting the wall blue and um value hack yeah this one weird trick there there was some major value engineering going on here it seems nothing says suck it so you like value engineering i think i think the uh the slope of the balcony was also increased yeah yeah first better for better

sight lines yeah it's really great actually so like it's so funny um yeah let me let me find like this okay so here's what here's what happened here's what happened too okay we now we get into like the seat dip thing uh they had because like this was like an elite in luxury hall it was demanded that the seats are both spacious and comfortable as well i think Cadillac not pariahs here uh and so they also like removed sidewall ornament and increased seating capacity which had to be done without lengthening the hall so to conform to its sleek architectural profile and so like this also made the hall like prone like prone to a weird kind of echo and like there was a lower it was like extremely absorbent uh and so like there was like it was basically

like not reverberant so like there was a weird echo there was like little echo a little reverberation but what was there was weird uh and yeah we've had wet now we have creepy yeah but there's other things like even even though like it was like a total screw up uh and again just because they weren't allowed to change anything in the profile of the hall uh but at the same time like a lot of the techniques this is where we get to the butt part like as you can see like this was a disaster like on the opening night like musicians couldn't hear themselves like it became very clear very like that and and verandah he just like kept fiddling with it like kept adding things kept changing them because it was all just like all they needed to do was raise the ceiling and make the

hall narrower and like they couldn't do that oh yes the cadio was just like he tried everything he tried everything and then he just threw thing after thing after thing and it became very clear before the opening night that like oh shit you know like and then the opening night was like a disaster the hall was like unlistenable it was so bad that they just it couldn't even last for a few years before they're like we have just got the whole thing it's a complete lost job like i mean this was like basically like what this said was that like the science of acoustics is not there yet it just isn't but that's one part of the problem is that like they didn't know exactly quite how to fix these things because like they still didn't quite understand like why things

worked to begin with they had basic like crude knowledge of it based on like what the technology was available at the time but like it's in a lot of ways though like verandah and his colleagues were really victims of of a broader problem which is that like people wanted they wanted this to make money they wanted it to look a certain way to increase rents and real estate values because you have this big architect involved like they were really kind of victims of capitalism even though like you know they've got a lot of money from it and this really ran verandah himself out of acoustics uh and he like he spent all of his time basically being on the payroll doing his like weird acoustic surveys and helping with research but he never designed he didn't

he designed a couple more concert halls i think but he this was like he like was disgraced basically and it kind of like wasn't his fault and yet at the same time like this is a this is the butt part many of the techniques that they employed in the construction of the one i call were really new and like without experimentation like the field would never ever move forward we would just have shoebox halls forever um and the thing is it's like they had really massive impacts on brandix colleagues like schultz and russell who would both go on to form their own acoustics firms after a schism that we won't talk about uh but the concept of like an overhead canopy as a reflector uh and the like in the later another attempted fix employment of retractable curtains on stage

to make the hall more flexible for use as a theater for speaking events would stay with like russell johnson who became like highly involved in the development of like both a massive canopies and b adjustable acoustics throughout his entire career which i think is very fascinating if i went back to school i would definitely like that would be my research would be on russell johnson but anyways uh opening night they had done you know months of tuning unsuccessfully in this theater and then finally the moment of truth arrived sunday september 23rd 1962 right and no one could be fully sure how the auditorium sounded until there was an audience in there and uh as kate said it was bad really really bad uh the journalist panned the hall but the real kicker was that the

conductors agreed it's shit um you know lennard bernstein said uh or this is from meeting minutes from uh the uh the philharmonic orchestra mr bernstein said as he listens to in the auditorium the hall has an uninteresting sound except for the horns and clarinets at no time does he feel he is surrounded by music he said the general effect is like hearing music written on a blackboard a low effort he said there is no presence or warmth right um you know he said there's uninteresting sound in without a sense of being surrounded by sound and there's a lack of strength and low pitched instruments between a and e better and higher seats than in the stalls dominational horns and woodwinds edgy high frequencies like they were amplified dependence

on musicians on risers or in certain positions on stage is not acceptable and disappointed it's impossible to speak to the musicians without strain you know no better than in carnegie hall right damn dude yeah that's wrong ripped it's bad yeah bad folks so they tried tweaks lots of tweaks lots of tweaks the thing is here's the thing about about about acoustics this is like truly there's like a fundamental rule of acoustics i learned in grad school which is like first of all avoid the bad second design the good and like honestly if you can't avoid the bad to begin with it's in like what we call like the dna of the hall there's nothing you can do nothing you can add that's going to fix it in a way that gutting it isn't uh and so like

it's really kind of a high stakes thing and it's almost it's so like there's nothing no surface level thing that they could do to this hall that was going to fix all of the problems in it they basically had to like gut it uh and yet at the same time like and i'll talk about the renovation i think we get to avery fisher hall in a little bit uh but at the same time like uh the thing is is that like the for example um like this this hall also did something that was very important like extremely important for the development of acoustics at mid-century it combined a shoebox hall with like real the real rear walls were displayed like a fan shaped hall uh and he really like this so theater show too is like another acoustician uh whose halls in the 1980s like including um like

the halls in baltimore and toronto for example like they they really he really was obsessed with this idea that like you can the fan was the most economical concert hall but it sounded like shit uh and the shoebox hall was the best sounding concert hall and he like truly believed that there was some way to reconcile these differences and this this reconciliation with economy and acoustics is what would would dominate the um development of concert hall uh of concert halls like in this in the 60s and 70s which is the period that i studied uh and it was fascinating because like they really did a bunch of weird shit with the form of concert halls like we like it was like the most experimental age in the entire history of the field and we came away with like some really

fascinating and great knowledge about it um that was necessary for concert halls to be better and the thing is is like yeah there's like there i when i was at like covering cycling at the velta there's like a line like that roglic the slovenian cyclist who won the what velta said to press after he like won a stage by like doing some like mental shit was like he was like yeah no risk no glory and it's truly that's truly like the the thing about acoustics is like no risk no glory but man sometimes if you take the risk you truly do not get the glory uh but it's it's fascinating to me like uh like this this so many things were learned from the failures of philharmonic hall that it actually despite being a huge piece of shit improved the field massively and improved

the field's understanding of problems massively because like baronic while he was figuring it out right while he was like doing his best still managed to like get a lot of information and data about like what things were and weren't working and all that stuff would prove to become useful in the future of the field so uh and it it avoided them for like making um making the same mistakes essentially um but yeah it was a it was a real it was a real shit show so what happened after right basically the orchestra and the people involved said like god we really this is unusable and they just like fired everyone involved uh which to be fair okay but then it became clear and there's like a really great new yorker article about this go ahead one thing i thought was

kind of funny is that when they you know baronic suggested some solutions and they eventually you know they fired they fired baronic um the building committee retained some outside experts to make recommendations and this uh this this committee of this this experts committee became known as the acoustical panel yes which is funny yes i think hindrick keelhose is like the the main the main guy on this and he decided you know the way to go is to just cover everything in wood right hmm yes yeah be more trying about it they're true some hair brains games it it was very much that wasn't gonna work either he seemed to have a very much a return attitude here he wanted to replace the clouds up here with the low wood ceiling he wanted to you know he was like if we

put enough acoustical wooden panels in here it's gonna replicate you know the quality of an old fashion music hall you know which he attributed to factors like you know the balcony supports the boxes the statue niches um you know it's true that that is true and how it worked and that's kind of what ended up happening okay so this this gets us into like who they hired they hired this guy named siril harris um so while both reineck and newman were like kind of like the high modernist guys siril harris was like a little more conservative uh and his work actually like before becoming an acoustician he did several he did dozens of shoebox uh neo what i call a neo shoebox hall all across the country he did one in utah he did one in washington state he did one like i mean he

did them everywhere he he did the kennedy center like this was like his bag uh but he was hired to fix philharmonic hall on the advice of this pan the acoustics panel and he the acoustics panel wasn't despite being like you know pseudo trads or whatever like they weren't wrong uh like the statues and the niches and all the neoclassical ornament does like fix a lot of problems with diffusion and like like things like basing the hall off of like the precedents of the past would have fixed the problems and in fact this reconciliation with modernism that had to happen is still what's going on in the current renovation today um because they they know exactly what they have to do to fix the hall and yet they still have to make it innovative and interesting

and so i put in the 70s uh when um siril harris got a hold of the hall he was already doing work on other projects and and knew that like there was a way to do ornament that was what you know like in architecture we have this style called new formalism which technically speaking max abramovitz's uh architecture for uh the lincoln center was a new formalist project like it was it was a modernist building based on neoclassical proportions uh with like neoclassical formal elements but not ornamental or elements and so like basically siril harris was recreating that inside the concert hall uh and he became very good at it and he but the thing is is he still ran into the same problem which is that the people who ran lincoln center wanted the fundamental problem

was okay so first of all like what he had to do was because like i don't know if you guys saw on the slide but because for a philharmonic hall had this very weird curves like weird fan like section or fan like plan and like weird milk bottle looking section he basically like the first thing he had to do was like okay like this just has to be a square like this has to be a cube we're not going to get around like this just has to be a square it has to be a shoebox uh right and that actually fixed a lot of the problems honestly but again we run into the perpetual problem that continues to this very day with when it comes to with with regards to like acoustic remediation and redevelopment of concert halls which is that acoustics is fundamentally antithetical

to selling a lot of tickets it just is the more seats you have the shittier your hall is going to sound there's literally like a golden like ratio of seats to square footage that you should have and like basically anything with more than like 2000 seats and even 2000 is like a little high anything more than 2000 seats period like is gonna like you're starting to fall off the clip there of the bell curve uh and the thing is is that Cyril Harris knew and this was like the the bugbear of his entire career his entire life was spent trying to mitigate like the contradictions of capitalism and acoustics and he knew that what had to happen was that the hall needed to be narrower and there had to be fewer seats fewer balconies in a taller ceiling like I said the classic

shoebox formula and like they wouldn't let him do that so like what he produced was a hall that sounded better but because there still had to be so many damn seats like and the hall had to be sufficiently wide enough to accommodate those seats it still sounded like a dog it sounded like a listenable dog but it was a dog all the same and so like again a cursed project and so ever since like the 1980s when like neoclassical uh postmodernism came back into style there have been talks about redoing Avery Fisher Hall and it's so funny how continually cursed this is like when I was in high when I was in uh graduate school for example there were rumors that like Thomas Hegelwerk was gonna get involved and everyone was like oh fuck like here we go again

the worst possible guy to like get involved in any kind of civic project that is like notoriously cursed the guy who did the vessel like oh boy yeah what if the console made you want to kill yourself yeah one thing I like you said it cost you ten dollars just to get it regardless of how much the show actually costs after one thing I like is that after the um after the the first renovation um and the sound still wasn't that great the New York Philharmonic Orchestra started to uh or the members of us started to refer to it as a very fishy hall that's cute yes that's cute so shall we get into what they're planning to do to it now oh yeah I mean I think this was so this was renovated again in 92 I think just a little bit

but it again didn't work um yeah and then uh one thing which I thought was an interesting fun fact is that the organ from the original hall was uh sold to the crystal cathedral and they mashed it into another organ to make a big franken organ wow that is yeah that's something else man I I don't like it I think I'm a deeply diseased man this is truly like literally this is a deeply diseased project like truly like a stupid project oh yeah like thanks Kate that makes me feel good appreciate it bud yep yep but it's like the thing is is like okay yeah they try to do some again more remediations in 1992 when we had like more information but again the budget on that was pretty small so there weren't that many changes made and it

still didn't fix the fundamental problem which is that lol the hall is the wrong shape yep like so okay now now after all this after all this all after all of this now they're like now the architects so first of all they call these guys diamond and schmidt uh and like this other acquisition guys name I forgot uh but like who works with diamond and schmidt uh is it Paul scarborough or joshua dex yes Paul scarborough okay no Paul scarborough who is like a you know an acquisition he's I'm gonna get in I want like the the everyone in acoustics has worked at everywhere else scarborough started his own firm I think in the 80s uh but anyways he's kind of like a minor character in acoustics but it's good as shit that they hired him because like he's like

kind of like acoustically conservative but that's what you need in a project like this which is like finally we actually need a little bit of conservatism in here uh like so what they're planning on doing is actually what should have been done all along they're removing balconies thank christ so you have that spaciousness above the highest seated listener they're narrowing the walls they're doing they're fixing the concert hall and you know what and you know what there will be less seats oh my god there will be fewer seats in every official hall this is the truth this is like the longest time coming victory for like the entirety of our jaded field like ever diamond instrument is really known for doing kind of like what we call modified shoebox hall

which is like a shoebox but like kind of like slightly different in form and in other ways and so like they uh like did like a project in 2015 in montreal that is like considered pretty good but again like they also have kind they're kind of like the like scar bro and like uh diamond and schmidt who often work together are kind of like the serial heresies of this generation of acousticians uh these are the kind of projects that they work on and they're still like having to deal with the bugbear of having a hall that is like classically oriented in terms of like acoustics and like architecture but has to also be modern but also has to like make money so like this is like his cross to bear now poor paul scar bro uh and he's a good acoustician in my opinion uh he's

definitely capable it's definitely glad that they didn't just hire the priciest guy they're doing the cool model thing where they build a big square uh big scale model and like do measurements inside which always also makes takes really good pictures uh and so that's like a really solid way to kind of like guess how a concert hall is going to sound um so like actually after all these years all these years and like billions of dollars literally billions not you're not even counting for inflation like finally avery fisher hall now david deffen hall having dodged the bullet of thomas heatherwick will now finally be unfucked hopefully this is like inshallah this is like inshallah this is like a 550 million dollar renovation i think to finally make the thing work

yeah they gotta do a lot of stuff oh yeah they're basically gutting it and redoing it the pictures i've seen look really nice actually uh it looks like honestly like a pretty tastefully done project they're doing some nice cool modern uh diffusive surfaces to get like what you would usually get off of like dripping ornament um yeah it's it's gonna be a nice project and i think it's gonna sound no matter what they do it will probably sound better than what was previously happening um but yeah so that's that is the end of the long story of philharmonic hall hopefully my my goal is that someone will send me out there to review it when it's done because god i really need closure on this okay please please i wrote my master's thesis on this like i had you like dug in like

the archives of like acousticians i like you know made models i did all this stuff like i this is like this is like my white whale as an academic is like this era era of acoustics which was like the worst ever era of acoustics because like failure is really fascinating to me things that suck are really fascinating to me that's why i like do mic mention hell like ugly architecture is like my favorite kind i think like yeah and this this had all of it this had everything this had like the failures of modernism the failures of urban renewal had like the failures of like scientific hubris it had like the fundamental conflict between things that sound good and things that make money i mean it's like a wet dream of like it's like it's like this this

fascinating like political social architectural cultural phenomenon that like really touches everything that like i love to learn about and love to write about and so like for there to finally be justice for philharmonic all would be great but also if it sucks again that would be top wall and i would never stop laughing and i would be very funny like that picture of jeb that is like the meme like just like yeah like i will just like my hands will be up and i'll be like tackling like little gremlin because it's like yeah this is like what you get this is if this project is fucked one more time then that is just fundamental proof that the ghosts of all those people that they displaced back in the 50s are truly haunting that space but the conductor has to turn around

to the audience and say please clap jev memorial concert hall and the clapping is like all fucked up because the acoustics are bad yeah incredible all right well what did we learn today don't displace poor people acoustics are still guesswork and you should only use guesswork at any time fire off a shotgun in that don't displace poor people yeah yeah get bring back the shotgun bring back the shotgun like yeah it's very acoustics are like accusations are really weird people uh obviously and like when i was in graduate school this this acquisition named larry kierkegaard came to visit us uh he's like an old man now and he brought uh like a slap like a little like marble sample like a marble countertop sample and like a metal spoon and he made us like

use like a um like a special type of microphone a parabolic microphone um which is like basically like a little satellite dish with like a microphone in it uh and he would walk around like tapping the spoon on the marble and if you listened in the headphones of the parabolic microphone you could hear like the reflections come back like it was like and i was like these people are freaks but they are my freaks like it uh i had a lot of fun doing architectural acoustics uh and it was always like my backup plan that if like i somehow got like canceled or whatever i could like have go and like retire into the world of doing spreadsheets for reverberation time for living though i'd have to probably refresh on my uh my skills here after all these years but as as a historian

i think i think a physics is a fascinating subject and if i had to go back to school which i probably won't i'd probably go study the history get a phd in the history of science and continue this work which is like if you can't tell like i actually i really love this stuff like i think it's i'm it's it was like my first love ever uh as like an architecture critic and uh as like an academic and which i'm not anymore i'm like all kinds of things now but yeah i think the main point here is like this is what you get when you display sport people this is what you get when like the Rockefellers try to do cold war stuff and end up like taking massive ls all around this is what you get when you try to fit a 19th century concert hall into a 20th century of building that refuges

to budge this is what you get when you think that like science solves everything which it doesn't uh yeah it has everything so good my real question is what is the soviet there's always a soviet equivalent there's gotta be the thing is the soviet equivalent of this is made entirely out of like reinforced concrete weighs 1500 tons yeah the it's it's it makes it makes the uh the people's powers look like a shoebox it has a locket on it for some reason afterburners well the thing about the soviets is that they reused for them like it was very important to like reuse the uh gilded age concert halls of um the of the of the russian aristocracy and like make them palaces of the people then it was to like reclaim them and like state their

claim there then it was to build new concert halls which of course they did but uh i actually don't really that much about soviet concert halls because there's not a lot of uh academic information on it publish in anything other than russian uh which is actually why i was learning russian at some point because i wanted to like figure that out uh i know a little bit more about like you goslovian concert halls uh which which are kind of more like you were describing uh they were like big concrete modernist labs ditto venezuela uh and south america in general actually south america uh architecturally fascinating but we don't time to go into that but uh the comparison that i make actually is one to social democracy uh for example so like at the same time that all of this was

happening like the berlin philharmonie was built and the berlin philharmonie was like the equally as important as philharmonic hall and shaping the history of acoustics was like i think probably the most influential concert hall of the 20th century but it's very different like it was built entirely with public funds it didn't displace anyone because berlin had been bombed to shit and what they built on it was like an empty field that was bombed to shit uh and so i didn't displace anyone that was the war uh they let their acoustician lothar kramer uh go basically absolutely ham and do like this weird vineyard style thing no one knew how it was gonna turn out and in fact people didn't really like it at first but now it's considered to be one of the greatest

concert halls of all time uh and every new concert hall is basically like a stepchild of the berlin philharmonie it's my favorite concert hall on earth uh and han charoon was the architect and he was kind of a he was he had very like social democratic views about how it should have been done like it should have been an open plaza open to the people like it should like like the the democracy of the concert hall was all in that like everyone had great sight lines and great acoustics like it was not separated by hierarchy the only hierarchy in the berlin phil is the cost of tickets but architecturally speaking everyone gets a good seat especially if you're a student then the cost of tickets doesn't matter but yeah this was a very different way of thinking than like

the uh i mean it's imperfect from like a political perspective and kind of like idealistic but it was definitely improvement over like the capitalists the pure capitalists not social democratic not not even i'm talking like euro social social democracy i'm not even talking like old school rosa luxembourg social democracy i'm talking like basic like post-war welfare state and so there's much better for example than like the american capitalist like way of doing things which is how we ended up in the philharmonic hall mess uh which were like seat seat prices and like seating and selling tickets mattered way more than anything else and so on the one hand you got but you still on both hands got concert halls that like improved the science of concert halls and but it's actually

quite a long time for them to understand why philharmonic hall or why the berlin philharmonie worked it took them about like 10 or 15 years of uh and it was actually a new a guy from new zeland niterald marshall who figured out that it had to do with the the terrace balconies end up like sending like early what they call early lateral reflections which are the reflections that that provide clarity to sound so it's like why if you have really strong early lateral reflections you have basically you can understand what's going on in the music and then everything that comes the late reflections are what give the space its spaciousness and so like the volume of the space combined with the terraces like provided like a really nice acoustics profile that kind of sent

early lateral reflections to everyone instead of just like to to people sat in like more favorable places and there's always so bad seats in every hall ironically the bad seats in the berlin phil are the ones that are now taken by rich people because they're like the private boxes those were seats in the hall yeah good based acoustics all right i think that's it yeah that's i think that's it but that gives you an example of like what other people did that was really good i stand i definitely i definitely enjoy the theory of build it now figure out how it works 50 years later i like that they have a cure time of like 50 years yeah meanwhile meanwhile the medieval mason's building cathedrals are like whoa 50 years that's real fast

well well those things like universally have terrible acoustics all so true because they need another 500 years different type of music well this is true yeah all right all right i think that's it well we have a segment on this podcast call me now safety third hold on i'll make this quick shake hands for danger hello justin alice yay liam and potential guest that's this cage is yes hello guest or whatever hi kate uh hi what's there i leave my name redacted and write to you today with my experience in narrowly becoming chunky marinara i work for a company that installs and repairs atms along with safes and other various bank related goodies our company does tend to keep safety in

mind and allows us to take safety into our own hands that's why i wear a bullet resistant vest and carry the pride of austria with me every day nice nice that being said my ceo has a tendency to agree to some of the stupidest requests from banks that i have ever heard in this instance a bank had built a new branch and had us moving everything between the two locations this eventually came down to moving the safety deposit boxes these are normally installed via crane as the bank vault is being built as even some of the smaller ones can weigh around 1800 kilograms that's 4 000 pounds these were not smaller ones and weighed easily over 2000 kilograms given that they had already finished construction of the second bank the luxury of a crane was

unavailable my manager rented some equipment that would allow us to get one safety deposit box off the others as they're stacked like bunk beds the equipment is designed to slip its arm in and elevate whatever the arms are under this equipment which is shaped like a stick figure i assume it's one of those manual lift things right mm was obviously never intended for the purpose we were applying it to i noted this upon reading the weight guide which was capped at 600 kilograms my boss muttered it's probably fine before cranking the device up we watched the steel spine bend like a strand of licorice all where the safety deposit box barely moved being probably not fine we pulled the lifter out and began brainstorming we eventually

settled on the jenga tower method see attached images oh no we built the tower and then used pry bars and good old-fashioned elbow grease to move the box onto the tower we then used carjacks to elevate one side at a time before pulling out the plank out of place and then carefully and slowly lowering the box at an angle this is the most dangerous shit during this process i ended up near the far wall of the vault which is comprised of lots of concrete and steel plating this put me in a position where if the box slipped it would pin me against a practically immovable wall i would simply not be in that position

knowing the potential crushing hazard we work slowly taking at least an hour and a half to get down to the ground where we could load it up and cart it out on a pallet jack i didn't notice at the time but i'm happy my coworker documented the entire event if something had happened he could have delivered the video to my family to explain why my remains came packaged in a cambell's tomato soup can why does your camera film with a lively gloco in the car left oh it is chunky baronara luckily no bad events transpired though i doubt it will ever agree to such a task ever again

and thankfully i'm still around to be able to listen to your podcast so thank you for what you do cheers name redacted thanks name redacted yes thank you name redacted shake hands for danger our next episode is on the tocoma narrows bridge no it's not no it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not boston molasses blood i don't believe you molassica i gave you the book and everything motherfucker all right all right plugs commercials before we go please let's go then liam uh trash teacher kehl james bond podcasts listen to them with your ears uh lions led by donkeys and my new philly sports podcast uh 10 000 losses

your redrick mansion hell kate plug your thing kate oh yeah there we go redrick mansion hell.com a blog about ugly houses that i also run also subscribe to her cycling newsletter and and yes derailer.net like the part of the bike uh it's very cool uh if you like cycling even if you don't it's like i don't know sports story time uh i have to go to sylvania now actually so okay next round next next next tuesday kate and i are on guest cred which is an architecture criticism stream which is uh uh run by the folks at failed architecture heaven and michael who we had on the podcast previously it's going to be a good time we're going to talk about trains um

so yeah uh listen to that we will we i'll put a link in the description there um i think that's next tuesday the 26th of october um at seven p.m eastern standard time i think all right all right everybody all right that's it i'm gonna go fucking way down all right